Snow-Camp Charity Combines Snowsports With A New Mental Health Programme To Support Youth

26th February 2019

Category : News

• Snow-Camp, a charity that helps inner-city youth to gain qualifications and find positive careers in the snowsports industry, will launch a new Mental Health Programme called Uplift.
• Snow-Camp has launched a new Mental Health Programme after their monitoring and evaluation data revealed that 83% of young people feel they need more mental health support.
• The new programme will contain a number of workshops and 1-1 support sessions that will focus on improving self-esteem, offering coping mechanisms and how to deal with social anxiety.
• Uplift will be funded by the George Bairstow Charitable Trust, and delivered by Kevin Hempstead, a humanistic counsellor and a registered BACP member and Doctor Carla Stanton.

Snow-Camp, the UK’s only charity using snowsports to change the lives of inner-city youth, has announced the launch of their new Mental Health Programme, Uplift. The decision to launch the new programme comes as a result of the charity’s monitoring and evaluation data, which revealed 83% of the young people they worked with last year feel they need more mental health support. Uplift will be funded by the George Bairstow Charitable Trust and delivered by Kevin Hempstead, a humanistic counselor and a registered BACP member.

Snow-Camp’s youth volunteers decided on the programme name “Uplift”. A name linked to skiing and mental wellbeing. The youth volunteers will be trialling the programme over the next few months and Snow-Camp hope to run the programme alongside the charity’s core snowsports programmes next year. The programme will contain a number of workshops and 1-1 support sessions that will help young people suffering with low self-esteem, self-confidence and self-defeating beliefs. The workshops will teach young people invaluable coping mechanisms to help deal with toxic attachments, societal conditioning and addictions.

The programme will be funded by the George Bairstow Charitable Trust, a Trust set up in honour of George Bairstow who was tragically killed in a car accident in 2013, whilst heading home from a shift volunteering for St John Ambulance. The Trust aims to support young people who, like George, want to volunteer in their community and have a passion for helping others in need.

Kevin Hempstead, a humanistic counsellor and registered BACP member, will be leading the delivery of the programme alongside Doctor Carla Stanton.

Lara Kinnear, Snow-Camp’s Operations Director said:

“Since 2003, Snow-Camp has provided innovative youth development programmes in London. We know that a lot of the young people we work with live in areas with high levels of deprivation and many have faced a number of significant traumas in their young lives including knife and gang crime. We know first-hand that there is so much more work that needs to be done to support young people across inner-city London. We hope that alongside our snowsports programmes Uplift, our new Mental Health Programme will help do exactly that. We’re extremely grateful for the support of the George Bairstow Charitable Trust, this wouldn’t be possible without them.”

Maria Bairstow, Chairman of George Bairstow Trust’s Trustees said:

“Snow-Camp’s work with young people is inspiring. Our Trust was founded to support exactly these types of programmes. George was a keen skier and was committed to helping those around him. We’re incredibly proud to be helping Snow-Camp launch their new Mental Health Programme that has the potential to help support hundreds of young people.”